Projection is a ubiquitous feature of human nature.  It is the cornerstone of evolution; what makes us human; the effect of an opposable thumb.  As soon as we could throw, we could make things happen; we could control the future (see  Projection, the missile of evolution. December 24^th, 2010), but this required us to perform the mental trick of imagination; to think the way things might be, to make believe. 

Psychological  projection performs that same mental trick, it transfers what we feel onto somebody else, to imagine it is they who have those some feelings and attitudes.  So we protect ourselves from  psychic damage by projecting the bad stuff onto  those we recognise already possess some of the characteristics we want to get rid of.  ‘She’s just so selfish.’  ‘I can’t trust him’.   He’s so lazy, careless, unreliable, fussy, messy.   This happens  all the time.  Just listen to how ‘a gossip of girls’ on the train criticise absent ‘friends’.  Look at how politicians try to achieve a semblance of dominance and control by rubbishing their competitors; how newspapers take hold of that and amplify it.  But it’s not just bad stuff.  Idealisation is a kind of projection.  When we admire somebody, respect somebody, fall in love with somebody, we transfer our wishes for how would like to be onto that person.  They become a mentor, a role model, an object of desire.  

Projection starts, like everything else, in childhood.   Children deal with uncomfortable feelings like fear and anger by externalising them.  First identify your enemy, locate all the bad stuff into them and then you can justify an attack.  Or identify the one you admire, locate all your wishes in that person and make them your best friend.  Projection is a mental trick.  There are goodies and baddies; in my childhood these were cowboys and Indians; the English and the Germans.  How differently you see things as you grow up.   Maturity is a state of recognising the bad feelings, taking them back and containing them, realising that what we criticise in other people is also part of us, accepting our essential humanity.    

Groups, organisations, institutions, governments, states, do it all the time.  They are pathologically split; they operate at a very childlike manner and project all their own concealed characteristics, especially the bad ones like unreliability, inadequacy, lack of sophistication, to say nothing of selfishness and ruthlessness onto  their competitors.  Colonel Gadaffi is currently the embodiment of all evil though only a few years ago, he was our special friend.  But the only thing that’s changed is our own projections.   Members of an exclusive culture,  music critics, art enthusiasts, historians, theatre buffs, vintage car collectors, can tend to puff themselves up by broadcasting their lacunae of esoterica to an audience they assume knows nothing and can be diminished by their ignorance.    

But projection can only really work in society if others identify with it.  This is what the psycholanalysts (another in- group) call projective identification or to put it in everyday speak, ‘how others make us feel’.   In voodoo, pointing the bone can cause others to feel so guilty by inference whether they are or not, that they slink away and die.  They have been ostracised from the tribe; they are not worthy to belong anymore and they cannot therefore survive.  Social exclusion is a powerful force; guilt and shame, powerful identifications.  People who have done something shameful to attract the projections of others, who use it as a shield for their own shame.  And it’s always the ones with most to be ashamed of that seek out those they can offload on to.  Those who feel unhappy make those who are close to them unhappy too  

Projective identification operates in so many aspects of human behaviour.   Bullies  can’t contain their own fear, so they make others frightened of them.  Suspicious people are secretive and engender mistrust and lies.  Needy people cannot give and induce need in others.  Those who are envious put on airs and graces to try to make others envy them.  Lovers who feel insecure may do something to make their partners feel jealous.  Unhappy and lonely people make those who are close to them unhappy too because at least they are toegether in their misery.  Teachers, who are not confident,  can make their students feel stupid,  but equally the over-confident student can make a teacher defensive.  ‘You make me feel sick,  you make me so angry, you just make me depressed.’    These are all common identifications within relationships. 

Those who carry a grudge are attracted to political groups, but can be very dangerous because they can cause others to feel bad and act out.   So did Ian Brady make Myra Hindley do it.  Projective identification is never a justification in law but it happens. 

War is mutual projection as each side used propaganda to unsettle the other.  Sport is the same.  Winning the mental battle wins the war or the tennis match.  Do not flinch; maintain the upper hand.   And we the observers so want the underdog, the good guy to win, we will do all we can to inspire him with our enthusiasm.  It almost worked with Tim and we’re trying our best with Andy, the nearly men of British tennis.      

Some doctors are so anxious they can make their patients terrified.  Michael Balint, the author of ‘The Doctor, the Patient and the Illness’ recognised this.  Patients pass the anxiety of not knowing what’s wrong with them on to the doctor, so that he orders more tests in order not to appear a failure.  Or their attitude may make their doctors feel angry, depressed, tired.   Emotional transference is such a powerful phenomenon.  As a therapist, I had always marvelled at how one client could make me feel so wound up and energetic; the next so tired I could fall asleep and have actually done so, but they were lying on the couch and I was sitting behind them and they never noticed.  

Actors are masters of projection.  They tune into their audience and can make us all identify with the emotions they project.  I have had two actors in therapy.  One made me feel so angry,  I actually had chest pain and needed to ask him to leave.  The other made me feel such surges of desire and compassion, it was all I could do not to take her in my arms and love her right there and then.     

But it’s not all negative.  We can also use projection to bring out the best in people.  Look at the way babies project their hunger onto their mother, who identifies with it and feeds them.  Falling in love feeds upon itself.   We project our beliefs and feelings into those whom we love and if they love us too and are a suitable object for our projection, they identify our desire and act in a way that intensifies it. 

Lovers  give each other those  feelings of security, excitement, togetherness, they’ve been looking for all their life, but what then happens to the bad feelings?   Well, if they can never let this love become as imperfect as the rest of life, then these feelings are projected out onto others, and the exclusive couple clings together united against the world, unable to trust anybody else.   But most marriages are not like that.  They are states of mutual projection and identification, and partners try to look after their own well being  by making their partners shoulder the blame and feel bad.  You never think!  You’re totally selfish!   I just can’t rely on you.  In a way they need the other to get rid of the bad feelings.   When it works well, it’s a trade off.    One may make the other feel alive while the other projects a feeling of safety.  It works.  The problems come when one of them changes the dynamic; meets somebody else, suffers a setback that destroys their confidence,  accepts a job that satisfies their needs.     

Projective identification requires us to think.  When somebody behaves angrily or badly to us, we need to reflect on our own attitude and behaviour and the reason for it.  How did it all start?  What was the trigger, the fear?   We all have responsibility in our functioning society to bring out the best in people, the most constructive response,  but in a narcissistic, self seeking society, people all too often have to have their own way, because ‘we’re worth it’.   It may be unfashionable to say, but I do believe that we have the friends, the colleagues, the children and the relationships we deserve because we help to make them the way they are for us

Why do we trust some people and not others?  Why do we admire some people?   Why do some people make us uncomfortable?  Is it because they remind us of significant figures in our lives; our mother, our father, a brother or sister, a lover, a husband, wife, a teacher?   Are they suitable objects for our projections?  

Projection is a ubiquitous feature of human nature.  It is the cornerstone of evolution; what makes us human; the effect of an opposable thumb.  As soon as we could throw, we could make things happen; we could control the future (see  Projection, the missile of evolution. December 24^th, 2010), but this required us to perform the mental trick of imagination; to think the way things might be, to make believe. 

Psychological  projection performs that same mental trick, it transfers what we feel onto somebody else, to imagine it is they who have those some feelings and attitudes.  So we protect ourselves from  psychic damage by projecting the bad stuff onto  those we recognise already possess some of the characteristics we want to get rid of.  ‘She’s just so selfish.’  ‘I can’t trust him’.   He’s so lazy, careless, unreliable, fussy, messy.   This happens  all the time.  Just listen to how ‘a gossip of girls’ on the train criticise absent ‘friends’.  Look at how politicians try to achieve a semblance of dominance and control by rubbishing their competitors; how newspapers take hold of that and amplify it.  But it’s not just bad stuff.  Idealisation is a kind of projection.  When we admire somebody, respect somebody, fall in love with somebody, we transfer our wishes for how would like to be onto that person.  They become a mentor, a role model, an object of desire.  

Projection starts, like everything else, in childhood.   Children deal with uncomfortable feelings like fear and anger by externalising them.  First identify your enemy, locate all the bad stuff into them and then you can justify an attack.  Or identify the one you admire, locate all your wishes in that person and make them your best friend.  Projection is a mental trick.  There are goodies and baddies; in my childhood these were cowboys and Indians; the English and the Germans.  How differently you see things as you grow up.   Maturity is a state of recognising the bad feelings, taking them back and containing them, realising that what we criticise in other people is also part of us, accepting our essential humanity.    

Groups, organisations, institutions, governments, states, do it all the time.  They are pathologically split; they operate at a very childlike manner and project all their own concealed characteristics, especially the bad ones like unreliability, inadequacy, lack of sophistication, to say nothing of selfishness and ruthlessness onto  their competitors.  Colonel Gadaffi is currently the embodiment of all evil though only a few years ago, he was our special friend.  But the only thing that’s changed is our own projections.   Members of an exclusive culture,  music critics, art enthusiasts, historians, theatre buffs, vintage car collectors, can tend to puff themselves up by broadcasting their lacunae of esoterica to an audience they assume knows nothing and can be diminished by their ignorance.    

But projection can only really work in society if others identify with it.  This is what the psycholanalysts (another in- group) call projective identification or to put it in everyday speak, ‘how others make us feel’.   In voodoo, pointing the bone can cause others to feel so guilty by inference whether they are or not, that they slink away and die.  They have been ostracised from the tribe; they are not worthy to belong anymore and they cannot therefore survive.  Social exclusion is a powerful force; guilt and shame, powerful identifications.  People who have done something shameful to attract the projections of others, who use it as a shield for their own shame.  And it’s always the ones with most to be ashamed of that seek out those they can offload on to.  Those who feel unhappy make those who are close to them unhappy too  

Projective identification operates in so many aspects of human behaviour.   Bullies  can’t contain their own fear, so they make others frightened of them.  Suspicious people are secretive and engender mistrust and lies.  Needy people cannot give and induce need in others.  Those who are envious put on airs and graces to try to make others envy them.  Lovers who feel insecure may do something to make their partners feel jealous.  Unhappy and lonely people make those who are close to them unhappy too because at least they are toegether in their misery.  Teachers, who are not confident,  can make their students feel stupid,  but equally the over-confident student can make a teacher defensive.  ‘You make me feel sick,  you make me so angry, you just make me depressed.’    These are all common identifications within relationships. 

Those who carry a grudge are attracted to political groups, but can be very dangerous because they can cause others to feel bad and act out.   So did Ian Brady make Myra Hindley do it.  Projective identification is never a justification in law but it happens. 

War is mutual projection as each side used propaganda to unsettle the other.  Sport is the same.  Winning the mental battle wins the war or the tennis match.  Do not flinch; maintain the upper hand.   And we the observers so want the underdog, the good guy to win, we will do all we can to inspire him with our enthusiasm.  It almost worked with Tim and we’re trying our best with Andy, the nearly men of British tennis.      

Some doctors are so anxious they can make their patients terrified.  Michael Balint, the author of ‘The Doctor, the Patient and the Illness’ recognised this.  Patients pass the anxiety of not knowing what’s wrong with them on to the doctor, so that he orders more tests in order not to appear a failure.  Or their attitude may make their doctors feel angry, depressed, tired.   Emotional transference is such a powerful phenomenon.  As a therapist, I had always marvelled at how one client could make me feel so wound up and energetic; the next so tired I could fall asleep and have actually done so, but they were lying on the couch and I was sitting behind them and they never noticed.  

Actors are masters of projection.  They tune into their audience and can make us all identify with the emotions they project.  I have had two actors in therapy.  One made me feel so angry,  I actually had chest pain and needed to ask him to leave.  The other made me feel such surges of desire and compassion, it was all I could do not to take her in my arms and love her right there and then.     

But it’s not all negative.  We can also use projection to bring out the best in people.  Look at the way babies project their hunger onto their mother, who identifies with it and feeds them.  Falling in love feeds upon itself.   We project our beliefs and feelings into those whom we love and if they love us too and are a suitable object for our projection, they identify our desire and act in a way that intensifies it. 

Lovers  give each other those  feelings of security, excitement, togetherness, they’ve been looking for all their life, but what then happens to the bad feelings?   Well, if they can never let this love become as imperfect as the rest of life, then these feelings are projected out onto others, and the exclusive couple clings together united against the world, unable to trust anybody else.   But most marriages are not like that.  They are states of mutual projection and identification, and partners try to look after their own well being  by making their partners shoulder the blame and feel bad.  You never think!  You’re totally selfish!   I just can’t rely on you.  In a way they need the other to get rid of the bad feelings.   When it works well, it’s a trade off.    One may make the other feel alive while the other projects a feeling of safety.  It works.  The problems come when one of them changes the dynamic; meets somebody else, suffers a setback that destroys their confidence,  accepts a job that satisfies their needs.     

Projective identification requires us to think.  When somebody behaves angrily or badly to us, we need to reflect on our own attitude and behaviour and the reason for it.  How did it all start?  What was the trigger, the fear?   We all have responsibility in our functioning society to bring out the best in people, the most constructive response,  but in a narcissistic, self seeking society, people all too often have to have their own way, because ‘we’re worth it’.   It may be unfashionable to say, but I do believe that we have the friends, the colleagues, the children and the relationships we deserve because we help to make them the way they are for us

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So writes one time Harvard Professor of Psychology, Gordon Allport in his preface to Viktor Frankl’s abiding monument,  ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’.   He claims it as the central theme of existentialism.  We might, however question whether it is always necessary to suffer in order to grow.  There is something Calvinist in that notion.  But what Frankl shows us through his narrative is how it is possible to withstand the most dreadful pain, torture and privation by finding and retaining an essential meaning in life. 

Viktor Frankl was a jewish psychiatrist, living in Vienna in 1939.  He could have escaped to America; he had a visa, but he could not bring himself to abandon his parents to their fate.   He was arrested by the Nazis and taken to Auschwitz, but he survived.  He wasn’t a Capo, a privileged collaborator; he found the meaning in his suffering to survive.    

‘Man’s Search for Meaning’  focuses on everyday indignities and privations, the cruelty, the lack of food, sleep and adequate clothing, the lice, dysentery, work, and endurance.      

After the initial shock of becoming a number instead of a human being, a prisoner enters into phase of apathy and indifference.  He tries not to be noticed, merges in with the crowd, gives an impression of smartness and fitness for work; does  anything that would stop him being singled out and sent to the gas chambers.  Many gave up, refused to work and accepted their fate, but those who survived discovered and nurtured an essential purpose in life that was worth clinging on to. 

 Frankl describes how the memory and love for his wife kept him alive.  In the midst of the most dreadful degradation, he focussed on thoughts that uplifted the soul;  an image of mountains, the coming of spring, music, snatches of poetry, the book he wanted to write.      

There is nobility in suffering,  Frankl claims, opportunities to find a moral compass and retain human dignity.  Suffering can bring out the best in a person if he sees meaning in it.

Fyodor Dostoevsky said that the only thing he dreaded was not to be worthy of his sufferings.    Those who let their inner hold on their own dignity and meaning, eventually fell victim to the camp’s degrading influence.   They gave way to introspection and retrospection, lost purpose and hope, and just lay on their bed of stinking straw and were taken away to die.    

Frankl described a strange timelessness in the camp.  Hours or days of degradation and pain, passed slowly, but months and years passed quickly, punctuated by suffering.  Survivors saw it as a provisional existence, something to be endured for as long as it took; they retained the hope  they would be free. 

Prisoners were supported by  the companionship of mutual privation.  They tried to help each other.  They kept each other warm at night, they remove the lice from their hair, they shared their food, they told grim jokes. They were a kind of community; they trusted each other.  Religion was a potent bonding force; prisoners often gained solace by praying together every night.

Unfortunately, their suffering did not always end when the guards left and the camp gates were opened .   Release was all too often associated with bitterness and disillusion.  Life had moved on.  Their family had died.  There was no work and they had lost the companionship of shared suffering.  Others could not understand   

For Frankl, his experience in Auschwitz became the mainspring of his life.  From it he developed a philosophy of hope and a psychotherapy for those in despair, based on the discovery of the meaning  of their suffering.   It was Niezsche who said, ‘He who has a why (a purpose) to live can bear almost any how.’   Frankl explains that the ‘why’ of existence is was not so much what we expect from life, more what life expected from us in terms of work and family.   Life ultimately means taking responsibility.   Sometimes action is needed, sometimes contemplation, sometimes it’s just necessary to accept fate.  When a man realises that suffering is his destiny, he will accept it as a challenge.  Such thoughts can keep a prisoner from despair.   Again, Nietzsche,  ‘That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.’

Few of us in the west have ever been tested in the way Frankl was.   But meaning can be threatened in other ways,  such as the  death of a spouse, the devastation of divorce, the collapse of love, the loss of purpose in retirement or unemployment, the estrangement from one’s children, the disillusion with a cause or faith.   When people lose meaning and purpose, then they succumb to an inner emptiness, an existential vacuum,  the boredom and loneliness, which lies at the base of much of the unhappiness of modern life. 

Empty people try to fill their lives with thrills and diversions;  the sexual libido becomes rampant in existential vacuum, so does the pursuit of power, the addiction to shopping, alcohol, drugs, the accumulation of money.  It is pure escapism into immediate gratification, a frantic search for meaning in sensation.  ‘We had such a wicked time, I got smashed, the sex was fantastic!’ 

Such diversions rarely lead to meaning.  Quite the reverse;  often the will, the hope, the purpose and the self respect dies a little more.  Frankl states that people can transcend the thrill-seeking self and discover a meaning in their lives by creating a work or a deed, by experiencing something or encountering someone (such as falling in love), and most of all, by the attitude we take towards unavoidable suffering. 

He claims that we can be ennobled by taking on the suffering another would have to bear, like giving up a relationship that would devastate them, an ambition that would cause them pain. This might give suffering a meaning, but it is avoidable.  And is martyrdom and self sacrifice ever a valid route to redemption and happiness?   Only if the sacrifice has a deeper meaning to the integrity of the ‘soul’,  outside of the act itself.  

 Survival of identity and meaning  (what I tend to regard as the soul) is more important than mere corporeal integrity.   The anorexic starves their body so that their basic identity and meaning can thrive.  And for many other sick people,  illness endures the meaning of what has happened, until a person can bear to bring it to mind.   If the meaning and purpose are devastated by life’s vicissitudes, then the body will easily become vulnerable to disease.  Mind, body and soul (meaning) are a continuum, which contains health and happiness.   

‘Man’s search for meaning’ was first published in 1946 in German under the title of ‘Ein psycholog erlebt das konzentrationslager’.  Frankl developed the existential concept of logotherapy from his experience.  Unlike psychoanalysis, logotherapy  does not dwell on the past, but focuses on the  development of a meaning in a person’s suffering that can break the cycle of loneliness and unhappiness.   

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This is a magic book; the story is not carved on tablets of stone or even inscribed in ink on vellum, it is scrawled on shifting sand and the tide keeps coming in and erasing bits so it has to be written again.  It’s like a personal website, that is constantly updated.   Throughout life, we update our internal website, we adjust the emphasis, create new links, introduce new characters, rewrite the plot.   

Consider those stories we told ourselves years ago in those early drafts; what we were going to do, the adventures we would have, the success we would achieve, the celebrity, the power, the glory, how we would fall in love and live happily ever after, have children who would make us proud. Those exaggerated tales of ‘derring do’ encouraged us to take the more awesome risks and made all the striving worthwhile.  We were indestructible then; the plots we devised then were so adventurous and always worked; triumph over adversity, good vanquishing evil, falling in love and despite difficulties and separation, being together at last.  They were tales of hope, life and death, but life always won; the hero would be back next week to survive another adventure. 

But for most of us, life does not turn out to be an adventure story, neither is it always happy or successful. Your career is not as exciting as you thought it would be.  The endless meetings are boring; you lose interest and lose out on the expected promotion.  The woman you fell in love with, beautiful, charismatic and kind, the embodiment of all your dreams, now leaves dirty underwear around, makes smells in the bathroom and can be totally unreasonable. Your son, the apple of your eye, fails his exams, cannot get work, and takes occasional drugs. The trick is to live with the disappointment. She is human just like you, part of you and you are attached; you love her with all her minor irritations. The narrative has to change to a story that is less exciting, more to do with  overcoming adversity, building a steady career, providing a stable home, finding joy and happiness within the family, rearing confident and independent children.  Respect, peace and satisfaction are the new themes.     

But consider another scenario. You discover that the one you would love forever has deceived you; it takes a lot of maturity and wisdom to adapt the story and forgive.  More often than not, those chapters have to be crossed out with a red pen and redrafted.  The romance is turned into a triumph of good over evil. You eliminate a major character to protect yourself.  The one you once loved to distraction, you must now hate to destruction.   

Things rarely work out the way we thought they would and we have to adapt our story many times.  We make compromises, explain, justify, excuse and forgive. As our mountain building is eroded by time, our story changes to one that is more complex, more understanding, more modulated and forgiving, more human.  The goals we set ourselves are less thrilling, our hopes less ambitious. Experience and the mellowness of middle age softens us in reflection. And if we are to live out our life in peace and hope,  this gives us the wisdom to accept and forgive. 

Not everybody is like that. Some feel so threatened and insecure, they cannot integrate experience. They cling on to the good things and attempt to eliminate the bad. They are suggestible and so impetuous. ‘Our house is a dream. A holiday in the Seychelles will be magic.  This will be the happiest Christmas ever.  I think I am falling in love all over again.’ They inhabit a polarized story; the bright narrative is exhibited for all to admire, but dark gothic tales lurk in the shades, ready to be projected out, condemning any deserving object that happens to pass though their triumphant progression; mother, difficult siblings, a previous lover, the estranged husband, erstwhile friends, the boss, the government – always the government. And the story they tell, has to be defended to the last rampart and ditch.  Experience, the way they have to see things, is merely adapted to consolidate their position.  They are into denial and condemnation. ‘Oh, he can be so plausible and caring, but it’s just a trick to get round me.’  For some tormented souls, everything and everybody is a threat and they are the victim.  Films, plays, books, television illustrate this black and white world.  It is exciting; it creates drama. 

People who have never built up a strong narrative by which to lives their lives; those with what we call a fragile identity can all too easily come to live somebody else’s story.  This is the power of the media, the church.  It traditional cultures, it may be illustrated by the evil eye or pointing the bone.  How many of us start off in life, like Philip Larkin, living out our parents ambitions and grievances?  It is to be hoped we don’t end in the same way, but life does have a habit of consolidating the narrative that they gave us.    

Just we need our personal narrative to sustain us, so society needs its collective mythology to hold it together. Couples, families, fraternities, tribes, nations gain comfort and identity from a shared mythology.  Cultures throughout history, have been defined by their stories; the Australian aborigines had their songlines, the Norse, their sagas,  the Greeks, their myths, the Hindus, the adventures of their family of Gods.  History itself is made up of stories.  Or as Alan Bennett wrote, ‘It’s just one bloody thing after another.’ 

We have to believe in something. Otherwise we are lost.  In the past, this took the form of religious faith.  God’s in his heaven and all’s well with the world!  Jesus loves us!  Allah be praised!  Now the predominant collective mythologies tend to be political doctrines, social advice, scientific evidence and the opinions of media pundits, but they’re all stories. We comfort ourselves with our imaginings and delusions.   

Our story is the cognitive backbone of our lives.  It imparts meaning and convinces us that things are known – we are known. We are ‘the rational species’.  At least that’s the story we tell ourselves!  We need to explain. As Descartes indicated; it’s the engine of our existence. The unknown is a vacuum that demands to be filled.  If life becomes meaningless, we lose the will to live. It’s not so much the reality that makes us feel good or bad, it’s the story we make up about it.  There’s nothing so good or bad as thinking makes it so.   

Our stories can be life enhancing, but they can also so easily leading to torment, melancholy and madness.  The voyage of life is never without its storms and dangers. . We suffer loss, dreadful loss, and can wander for years in a wilderness without plot or purpose.  We don’t always behave well, but instead of forgiving ourselves and letting go, we refuse to rescue ourselves from a punitive narrative and like mediaeval penitents, flagellate our souls with loathing and depression. Grief is a process of retelling the story, but when the reality of what has happened seems so dreadful and the story we try to tell  ourselves cannot console us, then we get anxious and make seek refuge in a world of make believe and fiction. But sometimes the memory is so traumatic that it cannot be processed by story telling; it short circuits the narrator and is relived endlessly taking control of the individual. Those who are mentally ill, suffer from reminiscences.  

Healing is not just about bringing about some structural or biochemical change in the body;  it treats mind, body and meaning (spirit or soul) as one. Healers are story tellers.   From the shamans of Siberia, the Amerindian medicine men and the sangoma of Southern Africa to the exponents of state sponsored evidence based medicine; they all try to replace the embodied tale of woe with an enlivening message of hope. 

Psychotherapy is a subtle form of healing.  For me, it is about understanding the person’s narrative, where it has emerged from, what it represents, how it may limit and entrap and then helping them adjust it to one that gets them out of their prison into a form of reality that is happy and healthy.  But this is a subjective reality,  it is about working with the patients truth.  Different people experiencing the same event will have different truths; everything is filtered through an individual’s own life experience, and changes with time and what happens next.

I try to get at the basic theme of a person’s narrative, the story that defines them and lasts through life, and forms what we call their unique identity,  because that theme will influence through what analysts call transference, every aspect of their attitudes and behaviour.   Every situation can be a suitable screen, every person a suitable vehicle for projection.  I need to know what presses their buttons and why.  I need to know what memories and meanings lies hidden away in the shadows and gullies of their shame and guilt. I need to understand the dark underbelly of their unconscious.  Only then can I help to ease their sentence and rediscover a narrative that is more life enhancing.  To me this combines essential elements of analytic exploration within a framework that attempts to change a person’s narrative perspective.  This does not have a particular affiliation with regard to doctrine, but is more a blending of the most useful aspects of psychoanalytical and cognitive behavioural aspects of therapy within a context that encourages sufficient confidence to explore a different attitude.     

We are a cognitive species; we try to make sense of what happens, learn from our experience. The way we think affects who we are.  So when our thoughts, the stories we tell ourselves, are making us unhappy or ill, then peace can only be obtained by engaging with darker, hidden, human aspects of our common narratives, the things we are ashamed of, and seek to integrate them into a story that is honest to ourselves.

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Psychoanalysis was (and still is) very incestuous.  There were not many psychoanalysts and most of these lived and practiced in NW5, near Maresfield Gardens where Freud lived and worked.  They still do. They were all in supervision or analysis with each other.  They reinforced the ideas of their ideological leader, but at the same time were intensely jealous of each other.  Given the Jewish origins of psychoanalysis, it is surprising to encounter how much psychoanalysts cling defensively to ideological dogma, despite evidence that it may damage some people and how suspicious, dismissive and paranoid, they can be to those who do not share the beliefs.

Although Mrs Klein was not as profilic, wide ranging or eloquent as Professeur Docteur Sigmund  Freud, her work has been very influential.  She was the first to appreciate that the child, even a child as young as two or three, inhabits a symbolic world of meanings, phantasies (her spelling)  and needs the agency of the ‘mother’ to understand and work through it.   In particular, Klein postulates, young children find it difficult to reconcile  contradictory elements in their mothers’ behaviour.  They split them apart.  There is the loving mother and the disapproving mother; the good breast and the bad breast.  She called this the paranoid – schizoid position.  We all know it well. The suspicious and defensive, remain locked into all their lives and the media encourage such splitting;  the government is either good or bad, wrong or right.  Most of us return to such polarized attitudes at times of stress.  Anger, envy, resentment, grievance, condemnation and lack of compromise are, if not everyday, at least frequent examples of this. 

The project of Kleinian analysis might be said to be the reconciliation of the polarities of human behaviour to achieve what she called the depressive position.  This doesn’t sound much fun and it’s not, but the concept is crucially important.  It is only by healing the split, that we gain understanding, empathy, concern, forgiveness and reconciliation.  We learn to accommodate and integrate our own behaviour and that of others.  We find ways of working with other people. But we have to experience the depressive position time and time again.  Every time we experience a loss, we have a choice, either withdraw and cut off or find a way through.  It’s a state of mourning.  Klein would say that we mourn the loss of the idealized ‘mother’ and discover the reality.  ‘Is that all there is?’  

But working through The Depressive Position,  leads to personal growth.  Loss is often associated with change and a burst of creativity. 

Klein drew on her own family extensively for her ideas; her archetypical Jewish mother, her unhappy marriage and her children.  The children were her first analysands. Melitta, her daughter, has 370 hours of analysis with her mother before the age of 9.  The idea seems repellant.  It is a wonder she survived it.      

Nicholas Wright’s powerful and disturbing play is about mothers and daughters.  It is 1933. Mrs Klein, powerfully depicted by Clare Higgins, has just learnt of her son’s death in a climbing accident.  Paula, a refugee analyst, fleeing from Germany, has offered to be her secretary.  Melitta (little Melanie) her daughter, also an analyst, arrives with a letter that she has written, informing her mother that Hans has committed suicide, but this is the latest and most powerful act of vengeance on the hated mother. . 

Melanie found Melitta interesting as a child, but could not show her the love she needed.  It seems that she suffered post natal depression after the birth of her daughter and went away for an extended period leaving Melitta to be brought up by her baba (her grandmother).  And when her mother returned, she didn’t so much love and care for her daughter; she analysed her. Klein inaugurated the British School of ‘object relations’  The chilling aspect of the play is the realisation that Melitta is an object, an object of interest and curiosity. There is interpretation but no human warmth.  

As she later complained, Melitta had no life of her own.  Her mother has appropriated it; her marriage, her career, everything.  Wright’s play shows her locked into an unresolved rebellion with her herself, caught between the mother she idealises and the mother whom she hates.  She cannot reach the depressive position.  She has to attack the mother she hates while craving the affection of the one she loves.  The letter about Hans suicide is a murderous attempt to rid herself of the mother who dominates her life.  Melanie, for her part, is also split, she wants her daughters love, but hates her betrayal.  In the  transference, Melitta assumes the symbolic impact of her baba, her mothers mother.  As the situation builds to a crisis,  provoked by the disclosure that Melitta has gone into analysis with a competitor, consorted with the enemy as it were, Mrs Klein throws a glass of wine at her and rubs the torn up letter in the waste paper bin in her hair. As Paula notes, she makes a symbolic attempt to drown her daughter in urine and rubs faeces in her hair.  The awful irony is that we can only understand this because of the writings of the mother.  There was no father to rescue either of them, to find the third position, to make sense and space off the pernicious diad, to lead them out of the claustrophobic forest onto the savannah.     

And what of Paula?  She plays the role of the good daughter with Melitta locked out of the house as the bad daughter. She selects Melanie as the idealized mother, she never had.  The play ends with Paula in her first session of analysis with Melanie, which cannot be interrupted while Melitta rings the door bell.             

So should we think any less of Melanie Klein because of the way she damaged her daughter?. Theory is all very well but a child still needs to know she is loved. And doesn’t the analysand, the symbolic daughter, also need containment and support to gain the confidence to grow.  Surely to withhold that can lead a fragile person into a unhealthy state of dependence.

Or should we think more of Mrs Klein because she had worked through her own  depressive position and offered her insights so that the rest of us might understand? 

Or should we just accept and make a balanced appraisal? Understanding  doesn’t mean we have to follow the teacher.  That must be a reconciliation of our depressive position.    

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 I have just returned from the taiga, a wilderness of forest and swamp in Northern Finland. And I began to sense that for me, the essence of nature cure is about living in the present.  For years now, or so it seems, I have spent too much  time regretting the past or dreading the future.  I have analysed endlessly, rationalised, explained, even understood, but none of this has brought peace.  I am not denying the pleasures of nostalgia or the excitement of hope, but these are too often tempered by guilt or fear, whereas the present just is.  You have to get on with it. 

Being out in the wilderness focuses attention on survival.  You have to engage with the business of collecting wood, building a fire, preparing a meal, even hunting or gathering, making sure you have shelter for the night, dealing with the midge, getting to the next place or just staying put. 

And with nature, there is so much going on all the time, light, weather, plants growing or dying back, animals, birds, the river, the mood of the lake.  It’s like a never ending test series, a book you can never put down, but much more so.  Nature captivates, asks questions, inspires curiosity, demands engagement. 

The book that accompanied my thoughts in Finland was Roger Deakin’s ‘Wildwood; a journey through trees’.   In the first section, entitled Roots, he described how his love of nature was kindled by an inspiring biology teacher, who took groups of boys on nature expeditions to the New Forest.  Over the course of 8 years, the boys made a detailed ecological exploration of a three mile stretch of countryside near Beaulieu Station.  One of their projects investigated the links between the unusual preponderance of the dwarf buttercup, myosurus minimus, and the ancient habit of corralling of wild new forest ponies for selling by the commoners.  They discovered how the tramping of the horses hooves and the heavy manuring of the ground destroyed competing plants but is ideal for the buttercup.  Another project demonstrated how half of the seedpods of the Needle Whin, Genista anglica, were infected by a weevil, Apion genistae, which was in turn eaten alive by the larvae of a chalcid wasp, Spintherus leguminium.   How wonderful to have a teacher who could inspire such curiosity and fascination. When mental energies are focussed on the meaning of the present, there is little time for regret and worry. 

Ernest Neal, my biology teacher, might have been an inspiration to me.  He probably was.  He wrote Woodland Ecology, based on the analysis of a Somerset wood and his dedicated investigation of the intimacies of the Badger led to the discovery of delayed implantation, an ovum fertilised one steamy night in autumn would not implant in the uterus until the following spring.  But the nearest I got to ‘understanding the importance of being Ernest’ was when he leant over my dissection of the sex organs of the Dogfish and said with feeling, ‘You know, Read, sex is a beautiful thing.’  In my innocence, I replied with an enthusiasm I considered appropriate for the situation, ‘Yes sir, I suppose it must be.’      

The books I read then, I still treasure;  King Solomon’s Ring by Konrad Lorenz,  The Peregrine by J.A.Baker,  The Life of the Robin by R.Lack,  all products of  detailed observation over a long time, a fascination leading to a complete immersion in the object of enquiry.  I got the impression that these authors were happy in their own skin.  The same kind of self sufficiency comes through in A Fortunate Man, which describes the author’s life as a country doctor or Oliver Sachs account of his chemical childhood in Uncle Tungsten. 

Engaging with life in the present takes you out of morbid preoccupations with the self or a dependence on others and a happiness that derives from a fascination with the external.  It takes you out of yourself.  But you need courage to let go of the familiar and entrapping and a will to commit to a wider purpose.  

For too long,  I have sought enlightenment in endless analysis.  This has led to a kind of understanding of the human condition.  But happiness, health?  I question that.  The paediatrician and psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott indicated that the purpose of emotional development was to enable people to be themselves in the company of others.  I would suggest that this might be extended to encompass self sufficiency in the natural world too.  Perhaps therapeutic camps could help those enmeshed in the misery off their lives.  Maybe whittling could be part of an analyst’s stock in trade.

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Nevertheless, attempts to bring the different therapeutic disciplines together has been beset with difficulties, so much so that the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy has relinquished the effort and claims instead to supports diversity, whatever that means.  Clearly integration is seen as a bridge too far. 

Separation cuts deep into the human society.  It exposes enormous ambivalence.  While we desire to belong, at the same time we wish to also be separate, independent, autonomous.  Donald Winnicott captured the resolution of that dilemma, when he said that the aim of our psychological development is have ‘the confidence to be ourselves in the company of others’.  But the company of others implies belonging to certain professional groups, societies or teams that encompass a particular set of interests or attitudes. 

That immediately introduces a split. If we belong to a certain group, we don’t belong to other groups.  While Pi, in Yann Martel’s wonderful allegory, The Life of Pi, might practice as a Christian, a Moslem and a Hindu, he causes consternation among all three sects.  He must choose; he can’t be all three.  The same seems to apply to the psychotherapies.  Psychoanalysts tend to dismiss cognitive behavioural therapy with ill concealed disdain, yet they would agree that the goal of psychoanalysis is for an understanding that brings about a change in thought and behaviour. 

Even the most inclusive societies seem to demand we make a choice.  This starts early in life.  At the age of 14, I had to decide whether I was going to study arts or sciences.  Later I decided to be a doctor, which meant not dedicating myself to my first love, zoology and ecology.  Then I chose gastroenterology and not neurology.  More devastating in its consequences, although I discovered it was possible to love more than one woman, I had to choose one and abandon the other.  To fudge, to be indecisive or deceptive challenges the social order, even though it might make perfect psychobiological sense. 

So perhaps separation is part of our encultured identity.  Society demands difference, encourages diversity.  There must be something about agreement, sameness that does not lead to progress.  Society is like a shark; if it doesn’t keep moving forward, it dies!  Difference and the anxiety and competition this induces, keeps society alive.  If The Government were not continually being challenged by the opposition, then there would be no recovery.  The only time coalitions thrive is when there is an overwhelming external threat.   

So each of us embodies a certain set of beliefs and attitudes that make us who we are and sets us apart from others.  That is socially acceptable as long as understanding and tolerance exists between groups.  It’s when different groups feel attacked for their beliefs and are forced to adopt adversarial positions and ever more extreme attitudes,  that difficulties ensue. 

Unfortunately psychotherapy, which purports to be the most understanding of professions, is riddled with sectarianism to the detriment of therapists as well as their clients. 

We need to built bridges, not broad bridges that reduce everything to its lowest common denominator, but bridges with a café in the centre of them that facilitate communication and understanding.      

At the last meeting of The Hallam Institute of Psychotherapy on July 1st, Keith Tudor, a Humanistic Psychotherapist and co- founder of  Temenos, a Sheffield group promoting Person Centred Therapy, delivered a seminar entitled Building Bridges over Troubled Waters;  regarding humanistic and psychodynamic psychotherapies. 

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1. Read NW (1999). Harnessing the patient’s powers of recovery: The role of the psychotherapies in the irritable bowel syndrome. In Baillieres Best Pract Res Clin Gastroenterol. series. (Ed. Houghton. L .A. and Whorwell P. J.) 13(3):473-87.
2. Read, N.W, (2000) Bridging the gap between mind and body: do cultural and psychoanalytical concepts of visceral disease have an explanation in contemporary neuroscience? In EA Mayer and CB Saper (Eds) The Biological Basis for Mind Body Interactions. Progress in Brain Research 122, pp 424-443.
3. Creed F, Guthrie E, Read NW, Thompson D, Ratcliffe J, Fernandez L, Palmer S, Rigby C, Tomenson B. (2000) A randomised trial comparing the cost effectiveness of psychotherapy and antidepressants for severe irritable bowel syndrome. J Psychosom Res 48 (3): 102
4. Read NW. Panacea or Placebo (2002). What Nutritional Supplements mean to users. In Ransley J, Donnelly J and Read NW. Food and Nutritional Supplements in Health and Disease. Heidelberg. Springer-Verlag.
5. Read N.W. (2000). Cerebral activation in Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Gastroenterology. 119 (5): 1420-1420.
6. Hobbis I, Turpin G and Read NW (2002). The Prevalence of Abuse Experiences in Sufferers of Functional Bowel Disease
7. Creed, F., Ratcliffe, J., Fernandes, L., Palmer, S., Rigby, C., Tomenson, B., Guthrie, E., Read, N., Thompson, D. (2005). Outcome in severe irritable bowel syndrome with and without accompanying depressive, panic and neurasthenic disorders. Br J Psychiatry. 186: 507-515

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